Plasma is the workhorse of the thick-plate fabrication shop: faster than oxy-fuel, cheaper to buy and run than a fibre laser, and happy cutting structural steel, stainless, and aluminium up to and beyond an inch. That versatility is also why it gets quoted so loosely. A bracket and a 25 mm base plate get cut on the same table, the operator "knows" it takes a while, and the price comes out as a round number that ignores how differently those two parts actually load the machine. Plasma cutting cost done properly builds the price from the real drivers — machine time, consumable wear, material yield, and setup — and then expresses it in whatever unit the customer wants: per hour, per foot, or per part.

This guide walks through all three. They are the same cost seen from three angles, and a shop that can move between them quotes faster and defends its numbers better than one stuck on a single gut-feel figure.

Why plasma quotes differently from laser

Plasma and laser share a workflow — read the drawing, cut the profile, deburr, ship — but the cost shape is different, and quoting plasma as if it were a slow laser gets you the wrong number.

• Consumables wear fast and matter. Electrodes and nozzles on a plasma torch are a real per-part cost, dominated by pierce count. On a fibre laser, consumables are an afterthought; on plasma they can rival material on a high-hole-count part.
• Pierces are expensive and limited. Each pierce burns torch life and has a maximum pierce thickness below the rated cut thickness. Forty holes in a plate is forty hits on the electrode.
• Edge quality and bevel cost downstream. Plasma leaves a wider kerf, a few degrees of bevel, and dross. If the print needs a square, clean edge, that is a secondary operation, not a free byproduct of the cut.
• The sweet spot is thickness. Plasma earns its keep on 6–40 mm plate where laser slows down and oxy-fuel is crude. Quote it there and the per-hour economics work in your favour.

The laser cutting cost calculation guide covers the thin-sheet, high-precision end; plasma is the other end of the same shelf, and the cost blocks line up but weigh differently.

The per-hour rate: the anchor every other unit comes from

Every plasma price ultimately rests on one number: the fully burdened hourly rate of the table. Per-foot and per-part figures are just that rate re-expressed once you know how fast the machine moves and how long the job runs. Get the hourly rate wrong and both other units inherit the error.

Build it the way you build any machine rate — not a shop-wide average:

1. Ownership — table, power supply, CNC, and rail depreciation per hour.
2. Power — plasma draws serious amperage; a 130 A system under load is a measurable electricity cost.
3. Gas — air, oxygen, or nitrogen/H35 for the plasma and shield.
4. Floor, fume extraction, and water table maintenance.
5. Operator burden — loaded labour for loading, running, and unloading.

The machine shop hourly rate calculation article walks through assembling this per machine. A typical mechanised plasma table lands somewhere in the €45–90/hour burdened range depending on power and shop overhead — but the only number that matters is yours, built from your own costs.

The per-foot (per-metre) view: speed turns rate into length

Customers and estimators often think in length cut, so it helps to convert the hourly rate into a per-foot or per-metre cost. That conversion is pure cut speed:

Cost per metre = burdened hourly rate ÷ (cut speed in metres per hour)

Cut speed depends on material, thickness, and amperage, and it falls off a cliff as plate gets thicker. The table below gives practical starting speeds for a mid-power air-plasma system — calibrate against your own machine logs rather than trusting them as gospel.

Material	Thickness	Typical cut speed	At €70/hr → cost/metre
Mild steel	6 mm	3.0–4.0 m/min	~€0.32 /m
Mild steel	12 mm	1.5–2.2 m/min	~€0.64 /m
Mild steel	20 mm	0.8–1.2 m/min	~€1.17 /m
Mild steel	25 mm	0.5–0.8 m/min	~€1.79 /m
Stainless steel	10 mm	1.2–1.8 m/min	~€0.78 /m
Aluminium	12 mm	1.8–2.5 m/min	~€0.54 /m

(One metre ≈ 3.28 feet, so divide the per-metre figure by 3.28 for a per-foot rate — roughly €0.10/ft on 6 mm mild steel up to €0.55/ft on 25 mm.) The lesson is the same as on the laser: speed collapses with thickness, so a per-foot price that is fair on 6 mm plate is a giveaway on 25 mm. Per-foot only works as a quoting unit if it is banded by material and thickness, never a single flat rate across the whole shelf.

The per-part view: the number the customer actually buys

A per-part price is the most honest unit because it captures everything the other two miss — pierces, consumable wear, and the setup divide. Build it up from the cut, then add what the cut alone leaves out:

1. Cut time cost — total cut length ÷ cut speed × hourly rate (the per-metre figure above, times the part's cut length).
2. Pierce cost — pierce time per hit × number of pierces × hourly rate. Count every closed contour: a plate with thirty holes pierces thirty-one times.
3. Consumable cost — consumable set price ÷ rated cuts/pierces per set, times this part's pierces. This is the line plasma quotes forget.
4. Material — nested sheet area per part × plate price (see below).
5. Setup and programming — fixed per job, divided over the batch.

Steps 2 and 3 are where plasma punishes a lazy quote. A perforated plate with sixty holes can spend more torch life and consumable wear on piercing than on cutting its profile — and an estimator who only counted cut length under-prices it every time.

Material and consumables: the two lines hand quotes drop

Material follows the nested sheet, not the net part. If a part's bounding box is 300 × 200 mm but the nest yields only eight good parts from a 3000 × 1500 mm plate, the material cost per part is the plate price ÷ 8 — skeleton included. Plasma's wider kerf and the part-to-part gap eat more sheet than a laser nest, so the yield penalty is real on expensive plate.

Consumables deserve their own line. A set of electrodes and nozzles has a rated life in pierces or cut-hours; divide its cost by that life and you have a per-pierce and per-hour consumable charge. Bury it in overhead and every high-hole-count job quietly underquotes — the exact jobs that wear the torch hardest are the ones the flat overhead under-recovers.

Secondary operations: the cut is not the finished part

Plasma edges come off the table with dross, a few degrees of bevel, and a heat-affected zone. Whether that matters depends on the print, and the cost follows the requirement:

• Dross removal and grinding if the next operation or the customer needs a clean edge.
• Edge bevelling for weld prep — sometimes done on the table with a bevel head, sometimes as a secondary op.
• Drilling or tapping holes too small or too precise for plasma to cut cleanly.
• Forming, welding, and finishing if the part is one piece of a larger assembly.

When the plate is destined for a weldment, the cut is only the first cost block — welding and fabrication cost estimation covers the labour, wire, and prep that follow. If the part also bends or needs tight flat-pattern tolerances, the sheet metal quoting software comparison covers how forming layers on top of the cut.

Setup, the batch divide, and margin

Setup and programming are fixed per job: importing geometry, nesting, loading plate, and running the first-off take the same time for one part or two hundred. Spread over a single part they dominate; spread over a run they vanish.

Batch size	Setup + programming (€90)	Contribution per part
1	€90	€90.00
10	€90	€9.00
50	€90	€1.80
200	€90	€0.45

Once cut time, pierces, consumables, material, and amortised setup give you a total cost, margin is arithmetic: price = cost ÷ (1 − margin %). The discipline — applying the same target every time rather than guessing per job — is covered in margin vs markup. That consistency is what stops the clean jobs from quietly subsidising the messy, high-pierce ones.

From drawing to a plasma quote that holds up

The arithmetic above is not hard. The slow, error-prone part is reading material, thickness, total cut length, and pierce count off a drawing by hand — and under deadline that reading gets shortcut. Pierces get undercounted, thickness gets assumed, the bevel and deburr get forgotten, and the part ships as a flat per-foot guess.

QuoteBuddy reads the technical drawing and surfaces the inputs a plasma quote needs — material and thickness from the title block, profile and hole geometry, contour and pierce count, and the secondary operations the part implies — so the estimator works from a complete picture instead of a hurried scan. The cost engine then builds the price from your table rate, cut speeds, consumable life, plate prices, setup time, and target margin, the same way every time — and can show it per hour, per metre, or per part.

Start a 30-day trial and run a few real plates through the workflow, from upload to an itemised quote PDF. See whether the cost it builds matches what you would have quoted by feel — and where the round per-foot number was quietly costing you margin.